Hello; I thought that points 12 and 13 were the most important. one agrees with what my dad always told me which is that it isn’t what you gross its what you keep. And the other making the point that we need to focus more on those people and companies we already know. I was reminded of this while trying to book venues for an upcoming trip to shoot youtube episodes about theme parks for my amusement industry based channel. the only ones that said yes were the ones i had work with on buying or selling amusement equipment. and you are so right about your story because I am currently struggling with the subject of my blog. the most popular posts are those dealing with my weight loss or my managing a business as a blind person. these get views shares and comments but they don’t necessarily sell anything. they may even be confusing some who follow or thought about following the blog. I don’t want to manage two blogs but i can see how it might be the right thing to do. I also have a similar concern about my other efforts social media, podcasting, youtube videos, google hangouts, etc. I look forward to your thoughts. Thanks for this amazingly detailed and comprehensive post. Take care, max
Choose your topic. The best blogs focus on topics that you, the blogger, are passionate about. This topic can be anything that you believe you have enough to say about to interest others. It works best if you can find a “niche” that is not being fully exploited.[9] There are several important things to keep in mind when choosing your blog topic:[10]

In the end, running a blog is one of those things that seems simple in itself, but the gap between just doing it and doing it to its fullest potential is actually huge. There’s just so many moving parts! There’s WordPress itself, writing content, editing, formatting, hosting, SEO, link building, social media, email lists, networking, and on and on and on.

Thanks so much for this article and all of the links! I’ve been thinking about blogging for the past year. This year I started my Instagram page and just this week joined Twitter and Facebook as a means of (hopefully) expanding once the blog is underway. My first dilemma however, is the name! For the past four months, I have been @travelsandtantrums on IG (and the other platforms) however, I am thinking of changing that name as it began as a way of documenting our big family trip this year – I hadn’t counted on growth (as you talk about in your articles). Also, as our kids grow up, I hope that the ‘tantrums’ will subside – so, I don’t know whether to stick with what I have or to change to a more ‘family/reality’ name. It is catchy but is it relevant if we are not ‘travelling’ all the time? Hmmmmm. I’d love to know what you think!
The major email services like Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL have made some recent changes that you need to know about. Going forward, you will need to have a domain specific email address that is connected to your custom domain. If you plan to send emails to your readers and you don’t have a domain email address, your emails are going straight to the SPAM folder!
The problem is many of our blog idols are very much like I have been in the past, spreading the gospel of large numbers (not always overtly – but displaying your traffic counter as social proof does make people see big numbers as an indication of success). People then pursue the same path, just like you share in your story – quantity instead of quality, when it should be the other way around.
If you can build a relationship with 10 early readers and work with them to pinpoint a challenge you're interested in building a physical or digital product for, focus next on repeatedly solving that problem yourself, then develop a plan of action for how you can personally help those 10 people solve that problem in their own unique situations as well. This'll be very manually at first, but that's necessary.

Working with advertising networks isn’t your only option when it comes to selling ads. If you end up with enough traffic, advertisers may come directly to you and ask you to place their ad on your site. You can also contact advertisers yourself. The biggest difference from the above mentioned option is that there is no middle man, which means you can set your own ad rates.